Biographies of Women Mathematicians

Marie Litzinger

Marie Litzinger was born in Bedford, Pennsylvania. She received her
B.A. degree (1920) and M.A. degree (1922) from Bryn Mawr College.
She taught at the Devon Manor School while working on her master's
degree. She had been awarded a Bryn Mawr European fellowship upon her
graduation in 1920, which she used to study at the University of Rome
during 1923-24. After teaching at the Greenwich Academy for one year,
she joined the Mount Holyoke College mathematics department in 1925 as an instructor in mathematics and taught there
until her death in 1952. She was promoted to assistant professor in 1928 and to associate professor in 1937. During this time she
continued her graduate studies and
received her Ph.D.
in 1934 from the University of Chicago with a thesis on "A Basis for
Residual Polynomials in n Variables." This was published in Transactions of the American Mathematical Society, Vol. 37, No. 2. (March, 1935), pp. 216-225 [Abstract].
Litzinger became chair of the mathematics department at Mount Holyoke
in 1937 and was promoted to full professor in 1942. At the time of her death, the Bryn Mawr Alumnae Bulletin spoke
of "the way Marie had built up the Math Department and encouraged the
close co-operation between the Math Departments of Smith, Amherst and
Mt. Holyoke."